Where waste accumulates and river Adyar ‘weeps’

Two Chennai residents find themselves carrying out a cleanliness audit of a 400-metre riverside in Gandhinagar, Adyar. A WRD official notes that the waste on this river trail could be the result of back flow

Trust a birder to make a short trail longer by taking measured steps, extending their pauses and lingering longer at every square inch of the landscape, their eyes gulping in ancillary details while scanning for feathers. 

Given what they notice in every outing, the local municipal administration should reserve a seat or two for birders at spaces where table-thumping official-citizen interactions over civic affairs, particularly waste management, happen. 

Recently, in Chennai, two birdwatchers made a short 400-metre trail along Adyar river in Gandhi Nagar seem longer than the 40,000 kilometre Pan-American Highway. 

Both members of Madras Naturalists’ Society, Sujatha Padmanabhan (a Teynampet resident) and Jayashree Santhanam (an Adyar resident) had set out on the trail looking for two migrants, an Indian pitta and an Orange-headed thrush that were reportedly haunting that space like the Wiltshire ghost. 

They spotted these birds to their delight; and they spotted something else to their dismay. Both the good and the bad have been documented with photographs.

An Orange-headed thrush amidst garbage by the side of the Adyar river in Gandhinagar | Photo Credit: Sujatha Padmanabhan